Characterization of planar hybrid dielectric-loaded plasmonic nano-waveguides used for nano-photonic circuits

Key challenge in the design of plasmonic nano-waveguide is to simultaneously achieve high confinement and low propagation loss. This paper presents that a planar hybrid dielectric-loaded plasmonic nano-waveguide (HDLW) could be a promising candidate to build high-performance plasmonic components. Our studies show that the HDLW can achieve better trade-off between the field intensity confinement and the propagation length than a metal-insulator-metal nanoslot waveguide does. Consequently, a 90°-circular bend built with the HDLW can achieve a total loss of 0.3 dB with a small bending radius of 2μm. A ring resonator formed with the HDLW shows the excellent performance: with a ring radius of 5 μm, this resonator exhibits a large free spectral range (22 nm), a narrow bandwidth (4 nm), and high extinction ration (20 dB). The superior performance of these plasmonic components makes them promising building blocks for nanophotonic integrated circuits.